Tales from Tech Support.
I swear, my first call of the day was nearly two hours – I had this one woman who told me she didn’t know the model of the modem she had, so I asked her at least a dozen times if there were five indicator lights in total, and named them (power, ethernet, USB, DSL, Internet) and every time, she affirmed it. It seemed clear, she was connecting with a particular modem, one that is very common among our customers.
So I troubleshoot that way, bypass the router she had and wired to it, tried to get in the modem’s interface, and finally found out she actually has an older bridged modem, that doesn’t even have an interface, let alone the lights I named off for her. She just went along with what I said! (elapsed time, approx. 35 minutes)
So we continue on, restore the router to the network, try to get into its interface to verify the connection settings, and get an “address not valid” error. So I verify the router’s IP address as she entered it (traditionally, 192.168.1.1 – try it.) with her a ton of times, and then give up, run a test to determine and confirm it beyond a doubt, and try again. THEN she asks me, “oh, well… does there have to be a dot in between ‘192’ and ‘168’?” (elapsed time, approx. 70 minutes)
Finally get into the router, correct her connection information, verify her address (for security purposes) and grant her the account username. Then, salvation came in the form of her not knowing the account password; luckily for me, the account holder was her roommate, who over the course of the call left the house without telling her. See, the policy is that we can’t reset passwords for anyone but the account holder or their spouse (even fianceés don’t count).
But come on! I don’t wake up before 10:00! I know it looks like I’m awake, but really… I can’t handle crap like that so early in the morning! Sunday is the new Monday.
Are you drowning or waving? 
Damn computer illiterate ppl!
It’s not like I expect them to know everything, but they have to know that not being honest with me is only going to set us back. Don’t call for help and then impede it, just do as you’re told!
When we were trying to log into the router’s interface, I told her that the username field should be blank and gave her the password. I told her to make sure the caps lock wasn’t on, and it was some six or seven tries before she ‘discovered’ that it needed to be turned off.